The advent of digital data transmission and storage has prompted more and more organizations and individuals to employ digital systems to convey, receive, and retain digital information. Digital information may include, for example, business records, electronic documents, pictures, video data, audio data, real time measurements, electronic commerce transactions, personal and work related email, messaging such as texts, advertisements, and the like.
For sensitive digital data, security is becoming an important consideration when being transmitted across public computer networks. Types of sensitive digital data may include personal data, financial data, health data, data that is sensitive in nature, data which a user wants to prevent from being exposed, and the like. Because unauthorized individuals, i.e., “hackers”, are constantly developing new methods and systems for eavesdropping, “sniff”, “hack”, “exploit”, or otherwise gain access to and acquire sensitive digital data, higher security of such digital data is needed.
Many innovations have emerged to protect the privacy and security of digital information. For example, some conventional forms of security systems include firewalls, data encryption, data encoding, digital signatures, hashing, password, biometric identification, and the like. These systems and methods generally include capabilities that either restrict access to data or transform the data into values which are difficult to transform back into their original data values. Thus, the data transmitted or stored by these innovations can be protected from the facile discovery by unauthorized access. Unfortunately, innovation has also occurred on the part of hackers, thus systems and methods for secure transmission and storage of data must also evolve.
The level of security of the transmitted and stored data is often dependent upon the ability of the hacker to decrypt the data, thus, it is often desirable to prevent hackers and other unauthorized entities from accessing, acquiring, or decrypting the data. Most current data security systems are eventually defeated by inventive, persistent, yet unauthorized hackers by brute force attacks or other exploitations. Further, hacking techniques are often widely published on the Internet. Digital data is exposed to hacking and exploitation either while in transit or “at rest” in a storage location. As a result, digital data is vulnerable while being transmitted across public networks, or while being stored, even in an encrypted state on a file server whether it is in a local system or in a remote system, such as the “cloud”.
Thus, what are needed are security methods that overcome the foregoing drawbacks, and renders more difficult the unauthorized access to digital data during both transmission and storage.